Marjory Fleming and Child Authors: The Total Depravity of Inanimate Things

Abstract

Marjory Fleming was a child diarist who wrote during the Romantic period; her diary was published during the Victorian era. Her text and its reception offer a test case for how “thing theory,” as synthesized by Bill Brown, might provide a theoretical approach that productively reconsiders the categories of “the child” and the child author

Is There a Text in This Child? Childness and the Child-Authored Text

“…Like young Marcel's text, those "real" child-authored texts came securely contained within, and sometimes layered over by, adult words. A case study of the adult control over child-authored texts is the notorious publishing history of Scottish writer Marjory Fleming (see Langbauer, 2009). "Pet Marjorie" wrote every day in notebooks, from the age of six until she died at eight years old in 1811; following the rediscovery of her works fifty years later, there was almost another century of delay in the actual publication of said works.…”